WHY YOU ARE ADDICTED TO SOCIAL MEDIA
A leading addiction expert tells Laurence Dodds and Charles Hymas the tricks tech companies learned from the gambling industry
A leading addiction expert tells Laurence Dodds and Charles Hymas the tricks tech companies learned from the gambling industry
Hacking a computer is about finding vulnerabilities. You look for loopholes and you find a way to exploit them. Hacking a human, it turns out, is not so different — and, during the past two decades, technology companies have learned to play you like a fiddle.
According to Dr Mark Griffiths, a leading addiction expert, social media firms such as Facebook and Snapchat have developed an arsenal of techniques to keep us glued to their products. He has identified seven “hooks”, drawn from 31 years of studying the gambling and online gaming industry, that drive “habitual use” — not addiction in the clinical sense, but frequent enough that other parts of your life may suffer.
“I don’t think Facebook or Instagram are deliberately trying to get people addicted” says Griffiths, “but what they do is maximise the time that people are on their network because that relates to the advertising they can raise.” No wonder the average person now touches their phone screen more than 2500 times a day. Not all time spent online is time wasted — but if you find yourself tapping and scrolling when you should be working or relaxing, you might want to watch out for these techniques, designed to make your smartphone “unputdownable”.
1A sense of investment
In a 1968 study of gambling habits, people who had already bet on a horse were much more likely to rate it as a winner than those who had not yet parted with their money. This “sunkcost bias” leads us to justify decisions we have already made, even if we unconsciously regret them. That’s why social media sites want you to build a profile that grows as you post: the more time and effort we invest, the harder we will find it to consider the idea that we might be wasting our time.
This sense of investment is well-exploited in mobile games, which offer micro-rewards for logging in every day. Recently, Snapchat added a similar feature called “streaks”. If you and a friend both send a picture to each other every 24 hours for three consecutive days, you start a streak. For every day you keep going, the number increases. If you’re close to losing it, a little egg timer appears as a warning. Snapchat denies its aim is to make its platform more compulsive, but the effect is to create a daily routine that becomes a habit.
2Unpredictable rewards
Imagine you’re in Las Vegas playing a slot machine. You’re down to your last few dollars but you just keep going. Every time you pull the lever, you don’t know what you’ll get — and every time you think: “This time, I’ll win.” Psychologists call this an “intermittent reward schedule” and it’s one of the most basic and powerful addiction techniques we know of. It’s unreliable enough to keep you guessing, but rewarding enough to keep you hoping.
Now look at your smartphone. That motion you make when you drag your thumb down the screen to refresh a feed? It’s similar to pulling the lever on a slot machine: you never know what will come up and only some of it will be enjoyable, but you keep going in search of the next reward.
Loren Brichter, the 33-year-old software developer who came up with the “pull-torefresh” gesture, has since admitted regretting ever inventing it, saying he has spent “many months and years” thinking about whether it benefits humanity. 3Social affirmation
All of us want to feel loved, and social media gives us a way. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like are full of mechanisms by which we can receive validation and approval from others when we check our notifications (more intermittent rewards).
The problem comes when we start to judge ourselves by the tokens we receive or modify our opinions according to what we can see is popular. Many people are reluctant to give a post a “thumbs up” if they can see nobody else has done so.
The ultimate expression of online affirmation is the Facebook “like” button. When Justin Rosenstein first built it in 2007 — originally called “the awesome button” — he wanted to create a “path of least resistance” to